Medical anthropology - Essay Example

Medical anthropology Medical anthropology is a young field, only about 50 years old. The foundations of medical anthropology have existed for some time, however, as a discipline, the problem of ensuring that it continues to develop and flourish belongs to prospect generations of scholars and students. Conversely, the generations of medical anthropologists will not carry the field forward without examining the teachings of previous scholars and teachers. By narrating his personal story, just as he so often narrates the problems of Haiti, Paul Farmer, a physician, anthropologist, and the author of ‘Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor’, (Farmer 4) displayed a corresponding between medical anthropology with that of the stories of his personal past.

Farmer believes that listening forms the work we normally do. He sharpened his listening skills, which get used in anthropology on an ethnographic context, when his first night at an emergency room, noticing that many slight cases were brought in just because people had no other opening for treatment (Farmer 73). Also, being a good listener helped Farmer to understand the complete effect of a 1981 slavery process concerning migrant workers in Florida (Farmer 29). It was the same skill of listening that helped Farmer understand and tell the story of Haiti’s, and also understand the intricate network that exists between privation and privilege (Farmer 302).

Just as the line between primary care and medical anthropology is often indistinct, the “bracing connection between privation and privilege” becomes even more ostensible the longer one devotes studying both extremes (Farmer 354). While at first, the part of anthropology that divides the structures of violence appears isolated from medical anthropology, these structures of violence introduce the vast inequalities that make medicine to seem inaccessible. Structural violence results to a system in which victims are blamed, endowing those who suppress the victims while inhibiting victim’s access to healthcare.

Farmer’s speech could have been unforeseen in its biographical content, but perhaps the key point is that the connection between anthropology and medicine can be viewed not as a single fact but a line that goes the full length on each of these disciplines. It is with listening, understanding privation and privilege (Farmer 82), and avoiding violence, that the future medical anthropologists will bridge the gap between practical medicine and social sciences.Works CitedFarmer, Paul Edward. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.

California : University of California Press, 2005.